After Grammy's Surgery, Two Are Joined

YORK — With his grandmother stuck in a Williamsburg-area hospital, a local groom brought his wedding to her.

She combed her gray hair neatly and carefully applied pink lipstick.

With a delicate cream-colored sweater and a knitted pink shawl completing her outfit, Ruthe Michael was all ready for the wedding.

But it wasn't hers.

Instead, 90-year-old Michael watched her grandson get married in the chapel of Sentara Williamsburg Regional Medical Center, during a special wedding ceremony held just so she could be there.

It's not the norm for Sentara to allow weddings in their chapels, which are usually reserved for more solemn, introspective moments. But after Michael had her leg amputated this week, the hospital made an exception.

It's also the first wedding for the hospital, which opened near Lightfoot in August.

"It was so nice," Michael said Friday afternoon after the brief ceremony in the hospital's quiet chapel, where the only decoration amid its muted colors was a garland of white paper bells strung just outside the door.

"I can't get over the fact they wanted to do it here."

Adam Terrien wanted to marry Katarzyna Krach, the young Polish woman he met last summer at the Williamsburg restaurant where they both worked. Krach, 23, had been coming to Williamsburg from Torun, Poland, for several years as part of an international exchange program.

It wasn't long after they met that they fell in love. So much so that when Krach returned home to Poland at the end of last summer, Terrien saved up the money to visit her in May. When he left, he brought her back with him.

This past summer, they talked about getting married. They decided to wed around Thanksgiving, when Terrien's family and friends would be in town. But about a week before the planned wedding at the James City County home of Terrien's parents, his grandmother began having circulation problems in her left leg.

That meant she'd need almost immediate amputation.

Terrien and Krach really didn't want to postpone the wedding, so they decided to change the location. With Sentara's OK, they found a justice of the peace and set the wedding for Friday afternoon.

"We wanted to make sure she was a part of it," said Terrien, a 22-year-old computer arts student at Thomas Nelson Community College who hopes to one day own his own business, possibly a restaurant.

He and his bride worked as cooks at Ledo's restaurant at the Holiday Inn in Williamsburg when they met.

And so on Friday, there was the woman everyone calls "Grammy" in her hospital-issue wheelchair sitting front and center during the five-minute ceremony. About two dozen family members and friends rounded out the guest list, crowding into the tiny chapel with cameras and big smiles.

Mike Terrien walked his soon-to-be daughter-in-law -- wearing a dusty-rose gown, an elbow-length white veil and a sparkling tiara -- down the aisle. After the ceremony, Mike and his wife, Susan, surprised the couple with a Polish wedding tradition, presenting them with salted bread (bread so they never go hungry, salt to prepare them for any bitterness) and wine, to wash it all down.

The newlyweds still plan on a church wedding in Poland probably sometime next year, once they save enough money.

But for now, it's enough for them to be husband and wife, and especially because Grammy was there to watch. *